3

Ivy's hands were shaking, and she hated that they were shaking, and she hated more that he could probably see it.

"You had someone look into my mother's medical records." Her voice came out low. "That's illegal."

"It's a hospital payment plan, not a medical record, and it's a matter of public collections data if you default on it, which you're eleven days from doing." Sterling said it without cruelty, which somehow made it worse. "I'm not trying to hurt you. I'm trying to be efficient. Those aren't the same thing, whatever you've decided about me in the last twelve hours."

"You don't get to decide what I've decided about you."

"No," he agreed. "I don't. That's rather the point of hiring you."

Reagan set the tablet down on the desk between them, screen dark now, and folded her hands like this was any other negotiation she'd walked into a hundred times before. "The arrangement is simple, Ms. Calloway. Six months, publicly, as Mr. Vane's partner. Events, dinners, the occasional photograph taken somewhere it will definitely be seen. In exchange, your mother's full medical debt is cleared, her ongoing care is covered for the duration, and you're paid a monthly sum on top of that, which I promise you is more than you currently make in a year."

"And in exchange I pretend to be in love with him."

"You pretend to tolerate me," Sterling said. "The rest of the world will fill in the story on its own. That's how it always works."

Ivy looked between them, the polished woman with the tablet and the man by the window who'd looked, twelve hours ago, like he might come apart at the seams and now looked like nothing had ever touched him in his life.

"What happens after six months?"

"The contract ends. You keep whatever's already been paid out. Your mother's care is fully settled regardless of how it goes." Sterling's jaw tightened slightly. "I don't renege on terms, Ms. Calloway. Whatever else you think of me."

She should have asked for time to think. She should have called her sister, gone home, sat with it for a night. But she thought about the text from that morning, regarding your mother's care plan, and the particular exhausted dread that phrase had lived in her chest since, and she thought about the hundred-dollar bill she'd left sitting on her cart out of pure stupid pride, and something in her went very quiet and very practical.

"I want it in writing. Every part of it. And I want a clause that says I can walk if it becomes something I didn't agree to."

Something flickered across Sterling's face, surprise maybe, or the beginning of respect, gone before she could be sure of it. "Done."

"And I keep my apartment. I'm not moving into whatever tower you think I should be living in for this to look right."

"Fine."

"And you don't touch me unless we're being photographed, and even then, you ask first."

That one landed differently. Reagan's eyebrows went up a fraction. Sterling was quiet for a beat too long, studying her the way he had in the lobby, like she was a language he hadn't expected to need to learn.

"Agreed," he said finally. "Though I'll point out you told a room full of security cameras to get off your wet floor. I'm not certain you need protecting from me quite the way you think you do."

"I don't need protecting from anyone." Ivy held his gaze. "I need my mother out of that hospital bed, and if this is what it takes, then this is what it takes. That doesn't mean I have to like you."

"No," Sterling said, and there it was again, that small, betrayed twitch at the corner of his mouth. "It doesn't."

Reagan cleared her throat, pulling a folder out of her bag like she'd had it ready this entire time, which, Ivy would learn, she always did. "There's a gala Friday night. Foundation event, press will be heavy. It's a good place to debut this."

"Friday," Ivy repeated. "That's three days."

"Three days is plenty of time to buy a dress," Reagan said, in a tone that suggested the dress was the least of anyone's problems. "The harder part will be getting you to look at him like you don't already know exactly how much you can't stand him."

Ivy glanced at Sterling, who was watching her with an expression she couldn't read at all, something caught between amusement and a hunger that had nothing to do with money.

"I don't think that'll be difficult," she said.

"We'll see," Sterling said quietly, and something about the low, certain way he said it made Ivy's pulse do something she refused to acknowledge on the drive home, in the shower, or lying awake that night doing the math on a debt that, for the first time in three years, was about to disappear.

Her phone buzzed at midnight. A text from an unknown number, no name attached.

Wear green Friday. Don't let Reagan talk you into red. Red is what she always wears, and it will look like you're trying to compete with a woman you've never met.

Ivy stared at the screen for a long time before she realized her hands had gone still.

She saved the number under a name she immediately regretted the second she typed it.

Insufferable.